


stepping stones or sinking sand

by lady_ragnell



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Canon Retelling, Character Study, Demonic Possession, Dragons, Gen, warnings in notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-03-27
Packaged: 2019-04-08 05:22:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14098143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: Valira Wayfinder travels a long way from the forest she once called home, and finds a better family than the one she came from. There may be horrors, and dragons, and a voice telling her she's not worthy of her friends, but she can make it through.





	stepping stones or sinking sand

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a post-canon character study for my D&D character. This being D&D, there are **WARNINGS** , in this case for trauma, violence, demonic possession and everything that comes with it (including emotional abuse), minor character death, and torture, as well as familial rejection.
> 
> Title from Joni Mitchell's "I Think I Understand."
> 
> This is a fandom now. Apologies/you're welcomes to all my subscribers. If you're confused, go [here](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/The_Campaign_of_Five_Dragons/profile) for the more serious explanation of this campaign and [here](http://theladyragnell.tumblr.com/post/172259729223/campaign-of-five-dragons-are-you-a-fan-of-taz) for the more ridiculous one.

Trilli is singing.

That's what Valira will remember later, with years between her and the memory: Trilli's lisping little voice, bright and clear, singing a song of her own making about the herbs they've been sent to harvest. All the younglings are there, complaining about the early start because the herbs are best with the dew still on them, but Trilli is singing her little song, and then there's a man.

Valira knows few strangers and trusts none of them, and this one comes upon them with sword drawn. He sees Valira and five little children and baskets full of herbs for medicine that would sell in a marketplace, that would keep an army on its feet: work he doesn't have to do. He smiles and reaches for one of the children—she'll remember it being Robin later, but she'll never be sure of it—and Valira recognizes the uniform of an army scout. She doesn't care what army he's from, but she knows that scouts bring armies behind them, that if they hear of people in these woods, gleaning the good from them, army quartermasters will follow, and she knows that's how four people starved the winter she was five, and that more would have starved in the winters after if that army hadn't been shattered and them forgotten in the confusion.

Later, she'll tell herself the comforting lie that she hesitated before she picked up the branch, that she considered it a noble and worthy sacrifice, that she considered it at all.

The branch feels like living wood in her hands, green and growing, and green, growing things like to do what Valira asks of them.

After, when the children are screaming, Valira doesn't comfort them (what comfort can she be, with her sleeves covered in blood?). Instead, she staggers away and retches up everything in her stomach.

They're still there ten minutes later, when the screams bring her one of her uncles running.

*

Valira knows what's going to happen, and she doesn't beg for a reprieve. Her first memory is her mother crooning to her while they hid in an old warren in the forest, their village broken down and all of them moving to a new home, a safer one. “My little flower,” she said then, “we must always be careful. If strangers come, we run, we hide. We don't let them take our boys to be soldiers, we don't give them cause to force us to pay them more of our harvest than we can afford. We never spill their blood, because they'll only spill more of ours. To keep safe, we can't ever hurt them. Besides, better to give up a little of our harvest and make sure he goes safe home to his family. He's still a man, after all.”

Her mother isn't calling her a little flower now. She's weeping into her apron, while Valira's father stands at the door to their hut with his arms crossed watching her pack what she can. Somewhere in the village, one of the children is screaming with temper or leftover fear, and Valira stuffs her pocketknife in her pack and wonders who will look after them now. Finch is the next oldest and she's only eleven, not old enough to keep watch over the flock. Rowan is a year older than Valira and never took his turn with the babies because they always minded her so well, but he's busy paying court to a charcoal burner's daughter at the edge of the forest. They may call him back anyway.

She doesn't beg for reprieve, but she hopes for kind words, for help, even for spared rations. She stands at the edge of the small clearing they've made for their few huts and only her parents stand there watching.

All the words dry up in her throat. There are no right ones. The truth can't be right, because even as they're grateful that the children are safe and so are their crops, she's murdered someone, spilled blood that could be spilled tenfold in vengeance. Her hands are shaking like she lifted a whole tree, not just a dry branch.

“I'll bury him as I pass so they don't find you,” she finally says.

The screaming rises again. Trilli. Trilli has always been loud enough to call a whole army to their settlement when she put her mind to it.

“I'll think of you,” she adds. “I'm still … I'm still your daughter.”

There's no answer. Just her mother's quiet weeping and her father's stone face, though she thinks his hands are shaking too.

She'll never remember when she gave up hope and turned to walk away. The next thing she remembers is filling a grave with dirt and pressing an acorn from the tree that dropped the branch she used into the soft earth.

*

There are many things Valira tells her companions about her next eight months, when they ask about them later. She tells them about traveling to the far side of the forest and finding a warm cave she could make into a den. Tells them about brewing bitter teas that kept her alive and panicking trying to build up winter stores, even about how she stole from the caches nobles' hunters left behind them so they would have supplies for their winter camps. She tells them about her first terrified trip into a local market town to trade some of her herbs for a whetstone for her knife.

She doesn't tell them about the screaming nightmares that scared away game for half a mile, and how she still remembers the scout's face, how shocked he was as he died to be felled by a girl of fifteen. She doesn't tell them about learning to trap game and crying and apologizing to each animal she killed for the first five months. She doesn't tell them about almost starving because in the beginning she couldn't convince herself to leave her bedroll, much less her cave.

They might guess some of it, but some things don't need saying.

*

Alya finds her when she travels too far with her traps, and she first grabs her by the ear and tells her to watch what traps she puts out during whelping season lest she ruin the balance of the forest and then stops, looking her over.

“Who are your people, girl?” she asks.

“I don't have any people,” says Valira, because by then she hasn't been back to the other side of the forest in most of a year and the words are just beginning to feel true.

She'll never ask Alya what makes her change her rough hold for a gentler one. “Come for dinner, then.”

Alya lives in a cozy cottage not far from one of the villages close to the edge of the woods, and there's a tame rabbit sitting on her fireplace. “Lund doesn't mind when I eat his brethren,” says Alya with cheer, and serves Valira a bowl of rich stew.

Valira eats it so fast she's almost sick, and then finds herself moaning at the taste of a sweet bun that _does_ make her sick. When she's done and wiped her mouth, Alya is waiting with a mug of water and a grim expression and a single berry in one hand. “I was just ill,” Valira whispers, as though she doesn't know.

“Eat it. You'll feel better.”

She does eat it, and warmth suffuses her stomach, spreads through her whole body. She looks up at Alya, startled. “What kind of berry is that? I've never harvested one, I would recognize it.”

“I could teach you how to make one. If you wanted to stay around.”

“Make one?” Valira looks up sharply. She wants to warn this kind motherly woman, with her lined face and her tamed herbs in pots on her windowsill, that Valira is a murderer, that her hands are stained with blood and her own family didn't think her worth keeping. But she wants so badly to be kept, so she keeps it back. “Why would you want me around?”

“I'm an old woman, and I could use a strong back and strong hands about. And you could learn my trade, I think.”

As it turns out, she can.

*

Valira spends four years with Alya, learning what Alya can teach her. Some things will only come with experience, but she learns the very basics and watches Alya as she does greater things. Alya says she'll never be one of the great druids, never a legend among her peers, but the people of the village love her even if they never take to Valira.

She learns a little of how people outside the forest work from Alya, too. Alya will nod seriously while a woman tells her of her troubles and send her away with a posset of herbs and say “If she'd just listen to what her sister-in-law told her for once she'd be happier, but no, she'd have me charm her troubles away.” Alya will complain about the soldiers who sometimes come through and then, recognizing one on his route, greet him happily and offer him a beer until he's so disarmed he forgets to treat her cruelly.

Probably she didn't mean Valira to learn that truths are best kept only for the trusted and that even a bad lie is useful if someone chooses to believe it, but Valira learns that along with healing spells and best of all, the spell Alya uses when she wants to talk to Lund, and later she'll think they were some of her most important lessons.

*

“You should think about whether you want to stay,” Alya says when Valira is about twenty and her lessons have stalled, since Valira only has so much power now, and few ways to stretch herself to gain more.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“You could stay here, become a village herbwife like me, maybe marry a farmer's son and keep his sheep in check and his crops growing strong and hand out herbs to the other farmers' wives. I'd welcome you as my apprentice, and you'd have my trade when I die. But it would be a waste of you, girl.”

For a moment, she's in a much shoddier hut, a much colder one, wondering whether to waste space in her pack on the kerchief her mother dyed her for her last birthday. “What do you mean?” she asks, and she's learned how to lie by now. Her voice doesn't shake.

“The trees listen to you even if you can't speak to them yet. You can feel the forest, and you care for it. You've taken to the spells I've taught you faster than I did, that's for certain. You could learn how to work miracles. You could have a better life than the one I offer you.”

“Alone?”

Alya isn't affectionate, but she puts her arm around Valira's shoulders. “I hope not.”

*

It's a month before Valira chooses to go, and in the end she does it not because she wants to leave Alya but because she thinks about being a farmer's wife, helping these people who call her a changeling girl for the way she came from the woods, and knows it's not the life she wants.

This time, when she leaves her home, it's with Alya giving her a firm hug and telling her not to cry, now, and to write when she can and visit as often as she likes. “You'll find a way, and a home,” Alya assures her.

Valira gives herself a new name before she reaches the next village, and Valira Wayfinder she stays even though Alya laughs at her when she shyly brings it up on her first visit.

*

There are worse lives than wandering. She finds her way to open plains of grassland and gapes at them until a passing man on horseback laughs at her and asks if perhaps she'd like to ride with him to town. She's never ridden a horse either, but finds she loves it and that the horse loves his master, when she has a chance to whisper the spell that will let her ask.

Valira wanders her way from town to town. She stops to work on farms and is asked to stay more than once, for the way things grow better when she's around. She learns the wonders of lakes and the beautiful roar of the ocean, sits in one spot on the shore until the tide comes in and soaks her, almost sucks her under and leaves her laughing even as she splutters.

A bandit tries to rob her of her few possessions and she kills him, calling a spell for her staff to help her the way she did unthinkingly so long ago. (She'll never tell her companions, later, that the first magic that came to her was meant to harm.) This time, she doesn't vomit, doesn't cry, doesn't bury him.

There's already blood on her hands.

*

Valira visits Alya every few months, but she comes back after two years and one of the young village wives tells her quietly that Alya passed in her sleep, that it looked peaceful and not painful and that she left her cottage to a young couple that needs it but that Valira is to have first pick of the contents.

Valira takes all the potted herbs and puts them out in the garden. Lund was long-lived for a rabbit, but even he had died a year before, so she doesn't have to worry about him. She takes some of Alya's components for spells, even ones she hasn't learned yet, and little else.

She visits Alya's grave and plants lavender there, for sweet rest. It's all she can do, when she doesn't have words.

*

She kills more men, because she travels on long lonely roads and there aren't magistrates to deliver them to. Some try to rob her of her possessions. One tries to rob her of something else, but she leaves him in a ditch and steals his quarterstaff, which is better than her own.

She talks to people too. Fellow farmhands when she stops to work and make money, and she spends nights with a few of them, men and women both, and finds that it's fun but that none of them make her want to stay, so she walks on.

She takes her solace from animals. She's always loved plants, loved to put her hands in the dirt and help them grow, loved to crane her neck peering for the top of a tree, but she can speak to the animals now, and she learns more than she might have thought. One day she feeds a deer from her palm and the next shares a snared rabbit with a wolf and knows it's the nature of one to run and the nature of the other to hunt and that neither of them are wrong for doing it. Her heart can ache for the families of those she's killed, but if she doesn't want to be hunted, she does what she must.

“Of course I know it means I can't go home,” she'll say later, and know even saying it that her friends don't comprehend that maybe her family are deer who raised a wolf, that it's their nature to fear and hide as much as it's Valira's nature to fight to protect those she holds dear.

She learns to whisper to the beasts so well that she learns even to become one, for a few hours at a time, and some weeks she travels that way as much as she can for the sheer joy and lack of complication of it all. Alya spoke of that mystery of being a druid sometimes, but she never did it much.

Then again, she and most others are much better at being people than Valira is.

*

When the letter finds her, Valira laughs. The king of the land she's traveling in tells her that if she does a task for him, he'll give her what she most wants in the world. How could some king of a country not even hers know what it is that she wants?

But her feet are sore from the walking now, from wandering without purpose. Perhaps a purpose is what she wants, and this King Seath knows her greatest desire after all. It's the kind of lie men with armies like to tell, but Valira goes anyway, for a lack of other ideas.

When she's given companions, she's wary. They're no friends of hers, and she's not of theirs, and while she knows she can't steal from a dragon alone, she doesn't see how such a motley group can do it all together. She trusts even less that they're being driven to the coast by one of the king's men-at-arms, who might be a man with a family but is still more than likely a spy.

But the sergeant dies at the hands of a goblin war band, and suddenly Kithri, spry and clever, is talking to their mage, handing her a pie plate and making them all safe, and Valira doesn't walk away as she thought she might, if she weren't being watched. She walks with them to the nearest village instead, and she learns to fight at their sides quickly.

They travel to the coast and find they've missed their boat, and Valira thinks again about walking away, but the rest of them are determined. Maybe the king has promised them something they actually care about, and maybe they believe his offer. Valira decides to stay, and helps them search the city for the only man foolish enough to take his ship to a dragon without a king's orders and a king's gold making him do it.

On the way, the goblin finds them again, shows them the inn she's working at, and they're offered work in exchange for rest, and are sent to the cellar to kill rats.

Later, she'll think the first time she knows she'll stay with them no matter what is when instead of killing the giant rats, they let her step forward and speak to them, and then trust her when she says they're good, that they shouldn't be killed. They don't laugh when she offers the rats a new life, and she doesn't know it then, but later she'll recognize that after that, she couldn't have left them.

*

Valira has no faith in kings or their promises, and she's numb with leftover adrenaline when Lordren tells them all just what kind of traitor Seath is. When the others make their vow to warn the other dragons, she doesn't say no. She doesn't want to die young, even if she's not sure what she's clinging on for, but to see the last of the dragons snuffed out and to see Tiamat rise and end everything else she holds dear is a worse fate than her own death.

The rest of her companions have resolve on their own faces. Phi, who beat a slave box to pieces. Quil, who brought fire in Windell and saved them all. Kithri, who changed a goblin's life with a simple pie tin and was glad to do it.

There's no talk of turning back. There's no talk of splitting up. For the first time since she left Alya, Valira isn't alone.

*

Almost as soon as she thinks it, they're thrown through a rift into the middle of a battle, and when they avoid that, she finds herself in a forest that feels strange, off, and Phi's face is bloodless and her body is young, no older than Valira was when she left home.

Valira has no right to tell anyone to change the past when she knows she wouldn't change what she did either.

When they come out of the rift, Kithri is gone, and Valira feels that it's wrong in the pit of her stomach, but she has no way to open a gate to wherever they all went, so she only hopes that Kithri keeps proving as resourceful and sharp as she was in their first weeks together.

They need more information, so they go to Theogonia, where the people are unkind to Quil and Phi and Valira seethes over it even as she awkwardly makes herself talk, sharing only what she must to get them the information they need, not that they find solutions to their problems, only information about what those problems are and the uncomfortable knowledge that someone else is looking for answers too.

They do, though, hear of a wizard, and when they find him, he's a vague old man and reminds Valira of her grandfather, the oldest man in their settlement, who died when she was eight. She speaks to him as gently as she can, and is glad when he seems to treat Phi and Quil just as he treats her. They glean what information they can from him about rifts, and an old friend of his who's likely to know more, and to her surprise he offers to join them as they travel outside the city to see a group called the Channelers, worshipers of Seath.

He's powerful, but she worries at how frail he seems. Still, who is she to tell him he can't come? They need more allies than they have, especially with Kithri's absence weighing on them all.

*

Leaving the city, they step into a rift, but this time Valira steps out of it with no memories of the time in between (in her dreams that night she thinks she remembers voices, and screams, but when she wakes the dreams are gone) and finds herself at Phi and Quil's camp near the Channelers' caves. Phi is quiet and Quil is shaken, her eyes red-rimmed, and both of them give Arfil sidelong looks.

“Were you in your past?” Phi asks quietly when Quil has gone to sleep and they've all agreed to find out what the Channelers are doing in the morning.

“No,” says Valira, and Phi doesn't ask again.

*

They travel on, everything growing more complicated as they go, and Valira itches with impatience, wants to be finding the dragons and not learning information that might or might not lead them to where they need to go. Idilus and Erelest, despite the rough start she has with the latter when her bag is snatched as soon as she's through the gate, are the first break in information they have, with word of where to find the red dragon, and Valira wants to be gone, wants to be warning her, even though she knows that helping Vesta is a worthy task too, if a smaller one. They learn just who Arfil is, behind his vague manner, and Valira is awed, and even more worried for him than she was, but if there's something wrong, she doesn't know how to fix that, and for now they still have dragons to warn, and a ship that will take them to Amana.

When they get to the dragon's island, though, there are more adventurers, and Valira remembers them, recognizes them as another one of King Seath's groups. Either they never learned the truth or they don't care, and they've killed one of the dragons, one of their chances at saving the world.

Valira tries to fight them, but two blows have her unconscious, and she doesn't remember much after that.

*

They make it out of prison, but they can't make it away from Seath, and Valira finds the half-elf paladin who leads the other group sneering at them again before they're dragged before the king.

She refuses to tell the truth, refuses to confirm that they've betrayed him, and he just laughs at her but she sets her jaw and keeps saying it, tries to talk them into more time, tries to talk Phi into having a chance to assess their odds, or Quil to prepare a spell that might get them out of this. Hopes that against all odds Kithri, angry and frank, will come tumbling out of a rift at their feet.

The last hope gives her a wild plan to stall just a few more moments, and she begs for a chance to pray, even as she silently asks Kithri's forgiveness for the pretense of piety. Valira's heart and hands have always been in the dirt, but she puts her mind on the sky and on Yondalla, of the stories of her kindness Kithri told them about before she disappeared, and she begs for aid, begs for word, begs for _something_.

And then, like a light in her mind, she gets it. Yondalla assures her that their allies will wait for them, that all will be well, and Valira knows that any temple she passes, she'll always leave an offering for Yondalla from now on, for word when she needed it most.

They still have to board Seath's garish green ship and go to a dragon whose heart he wants them to bring, but away from Seath, things will be easier.

Or so she thinks until a storm finds them and a wave washes them all overboard and the ocean swallows them all up.

*

_Welcome_ , says a strange voice, and when everyone is puzzled when Valira asks if anyone is going to answer, she knows something is terribly wrong.

For a few moments, she imagines that it's an ancient animal or even a still-living tree calling for her, but the voice in her head is sly and cruel and Alya told her stories of demons, how they wander into people's heads and don't let go until they've sucked them dry.

Quil and Phi ask her what it's saying, and she knows she trusts them when she tells them instead of lying. It wants her to believe that the two of them are strong, that the two of them don't need her as she is but that with the power of a demon, and for the mere price of a soul … her companions tell her it's wrong, tell her it's lying and not to give in, and Valira might not quite believe them, but she does her best to ignore the demon.

If it wants to hurt her, after all, there are other things that will hurt worse. As long as it's taunting her for not being useful enough, it's not taunting her for the blood on her hands.

There's a drider there with them, and Valira knows she can't fight it. Even Phi can't, even Quil's magic fails her and hurts her more than it helps them. Vander, along and sullen about it, is so hurt she thinks he might die, and in the end, it seems Valira cares less about her soul than she does about her companions.

“Promise you won't use it,” they'll say to her later, over and over again, whenever troubles comes and they seem to be over their heads. “We're not worth your soul.”

Valira never bothers to make the promises, because she knows that's not true, and if she feels a little empty, if her memories of home and Alya are a little less colorful when she splutters her way to the surface and splashes her way to the Jeno, it's a price she's more than willing to pay.

And the demon keeps talking, talking, talking, but Valira knows how to lie, and after so long of doing it, she knows how to recognize liars, too.

*

A rift spits Kithri out, and they ask her if she was in her own past for so long, but she's desperate and hard-eyed and calling curses on a goddess whose works haven't been felt on the material plane for centuries, and she says little but says enough to make Valira feel sick.

Once, she was good at comforting children, but that was a lifetime ago, and Kithri isn't Trilli with a bumped knee or Andula with a fright of bears. She has her own new burden to bear and feels desperately unable to help with Kithri's, and knows Quil feels just as helpless. Kithri's anger is only a lesson in how little time Valira spent with her before the first rift swallowed them, but she makes a vow that she'll do better, that she'll take Kithri aside and tell her that her goddess was kind to Valira when she needed it and that she owes Kithri and Yondalla both a debt, but Kithri is gone again before she can say it.

And then everything is worse, because she hears the sound of an explosion, sees the Jeno all in a wreck and no one inside it, and a voice whispers _That looks like a god's work_ , but Kithri is gone and Arfil is gone and Keene is gone and Valira is almost grateful when a rift swallows her up.

*

When she steps out into her present, not her past, at the home of the man who had the rift crystal after Idilus and Vander, she wants to scream and beat her fists against something. It's like the first rift, to Phi's past, had her and didn't like the taste of her, and now when whoever is controlling the crystal wants her out of the way, she's only wrapped up in blankness.

“Are you all right?” Phi asks, after explaining that there's a dragon up the mountain and that it will be a riddle to get to it. “Were you in your past?”

“Let's go,” Valira snaps, and doesn't say _I wish I was, I would still kill him but this time I would kiss my parents goodbye in the morning before I left and tell them I love them when they would still listen_ , because Phi and Quil both went to their pasts and came out close to tears and if they knew she longed for it she doesn't know what they would say.

*

They battle their way up the mountain. Valira grits her teeth and heals her friends as much as she can and is relieved, when they're up past the snow line, to see mammoths, ridden by men who seem friendly despite their spears.

She laughs, nearly delirious with relief, and introduces herself quietly to one of the mammoths and then to Vangold, who's the son of the village leader and who seems to trust her best, recognizing that she's a druid or at least a lover of animals. She thinks they know of the dragon, and she's glad to go with them and get warm, to talk to friendly faces and meet the beasts who make living on the mountain possible.

Before they can meet the dragon, they have to prove themselves, and Valira spends a frustrating day with Quil and Phi and a cave full of ice mephits and her demon in her head, musing that the name Ristel sounds familiar.

Everything connects too much, and it makes her feel like Seath is a tree whose roots travel everywhere, poisoning every part of this journey.

She half-expects Shulva to be dead when she gets there, but he lives, and he gives them advice to find the last one, and she nearly weeps with the relief. They beg him to stay hidden and safe, and Valira hopes he'll listen, and that Vangold and his people can make sure that he does.

They stay another night in the village, and Valira is given something to help her on her journey, new armor that might keep her safe on their treacherous way down the mountain. She thanks them, and stays up late talking to men and mammoths both. Vangold watches her, and she thinks he would happily share his bed, if she showed interest, but the demon says something snide and Valira turns away, goes back to crooning foolish endearments to the huge beasts that could crush her or harm her in moments but instead choose to let her huddle close against their warm fur.

*

Kithri finds them on their way down the mountain, and she's still closed off and hard-eyed, but there's a little more ease to her. They lose Phi, though, as they travel down a dangerous path, and Valira takes hit after hit after hit trying desperately to protect her friends.

In the end, she's unconscious and she knows that Quil and Kithri can't last forever, so she gives in to the demon's urging, and then everything is a blaze of fire and when she wakes, she can't look them in the eye, because she knows they'll tell her she can't afford to sell her soul piecemeal but she sacrificed her family once for saving it. She'll sacrifice her soul to keep her friends alive and call it a fair trade.

She only wonders if the next time she sees mammoths she'll love them a little less.

*

Kithri is gone again and Phi returns and together they to look in on those they lost on the Jeno—on Captain Keene, shaking his fist on a grassy plain but blessedly safe, and then on Arfil, and she's almost sick when she sees what's been done to him, the way he's trussed up in spiderwebs and in misery and pain.

If her demon had offered then, to save him and bring him back with his life and soul intact, she would have given the rest of hers up without complaining.

Instead, she makes plans to go to the Underdark.

*

The Underdark is a mess of flitting shadows and creatures coming out of them to hurt them. Valira fights battle after battle, with a brief rest in the myconid's strange version of Some Hole, and only doesn't use the demon because she can't bear to see Phi and Quil disappointed. They both work so hard at goodness, and giving into the temptation of evil has to be a last resort, if she's going to be worthy of that work and affection. She fights with her staff and her spells instead, and they arrive in Mezzon with her soul no more degraded than it already was.

Mezzon itself is a whole different kind of horrifying. Valira's heart is in her throat the whole time they explore the temple, and they're so close to finding Arfil but it all goes wrong, and then her friends are gone and she's in prison and alone.

None of the people in the slave camp speak any tongue she knows, but she thinks of Alya and casts goodberry as many times as she can, handing the results out to anyone who looks starving or hurt. She keeps clear of the mind-flayers, since there's already one thing in her head that she doesn't want there, and she thinks of how to escape, how to create a big enough distraction to get back inside the temple and back to her friends, wherever they've gone.

Phi and Quil won't have left her. They wouldn't have even considered it, and she lets that thought warm her and keep her thoughts sharp as she realizes the pattern of people leaving for the island in the middle of the prison camp.

She goes to it, hoping for solutions, and finds, of all things, a herd of sheep with coats of silk and mouths like a wolf's. She speaks to one of them, brokers a deal and makes a promise: she'll take them to the surface, get them the fish they long to taste, if they revolt and try to run when she gives them the signal.

In the end, she skates too close to the edge and she gives them the signal, but she has to break her promise, because they need to leave fast, fast, fast, before they're captured, their time in the Underdark useless except for a stolen rift crystal that might, at least, keep them from being swept away again and again.

*

There have been so few victories that it's a shock when there are a series of them all in a row. Kithri returns, after a sojourn in Elysium she doesn't wish to discuss, and they use the rift crystal to go to Captain Keene, and find Lauren and the crew and even the rats when they find him as well. Valira weeps, overcome with the joy of finding at least some of their friends well, and weeps again when the rats say they've made a home there, away from the encroachments of human cities, with plenty to eat.

They leave the rats behind but Kithri _stays_ , and it feels like a miracle to keep her for even that long. They speak to Yondalla about Arfil, and are told only that someone has to take his place on Lloth's web.

Valira opens her mouth to volunteer herself, but it has to be a worthy soul, and she's been tearing pieces of hers away since long before the demon started doing it for her. If she thought it would work, she would walk into Lloth's realm herself, but as it is they all puzzle over the mystery.

Solomon compounds the victory with gifts, and Valira finds herself with a staff that has powers beyond all imagination, a staff with the power to raise the dead, and if she's worthy of that, the way he says she must be, she must be worthy of replacing Arfil, but wouldn't Yondalla have said so, if she could?

But they're stuck in the city, with the Jeno still destroyed, and they need funds, so she can't take her new staff to Seath the way she wants. Instead, they take jobs, kill beasts who are hurting people, and Valira reminds herself that some deaths are necessary, that not all of them tarnish the soul.

It helps to start singing whenever the demon tries to tell her otherwise.

*

Solomon has done many services for them, given them incredible gifts, and when Valira asks if there's anything they can do for him, she's happy enough to go in search of his errant cousin.

It takes her a moment to remember the name Haoti Ewhoza, and then she remembers the sneer on the paladin's face when he beat them twice in Seath's service, and she won't go back on her word, but when the others all groan and debate whether he's worth saving on their travel back to the fire giant's keep, she agrees.

But Solomon called him a good man, and Valira walks into the city wondering if she could have become Haoti Ewhoza, had she been given different companions. If she'd made the first boat of adventurers, if she didn't have Kithri, unwilling to sacrifice a life, Phi, who thinks so steadily about which choice is best before unfailingly choosing it, and Quil, whose anger is always to a purpose, would she have let King Seath twist her?

When she sees him in the prison, he's such a pathetic figure that she forgets to hate him. She doesn't unchain him, but she thinks of Alya again and feeds him a berry that makes him straighten and gain back some of his old arrogance.

Her demon, sharp, tells her to watch out, that Ewhoza has a demon of his own and has given far more of himself to her, and then she can't ignore the kinship between them. If he's had someone whispering poison in his ear and hadn't already lived the worst and made the first choice that would make all others seem lesser, hadn't had companions to tell him that this whispers were wrong … in his position, she might have been twisted too.

She doesn't trust him, but she pities him, and she lets the others treat him roughly, but she feels sick, and sicker when they return to Solomon and he speaks of redemption even as he puts a collar around Ewhoza's neck.

She'll die before she's forced into a collar, and she takes Phi aside, steady Phi who will do what's necessary if she's sure it's the right choice, and tells her that if the demon takes control, if she becomes like Haoti Ewhoza, she wants Phi to kill her and keep the others safe.

Phi is unhappy, and Valira knows she just burdened her with a weight she doesn't need, but she feels better knowing that there's some difference between she and Ewhoza after all.

*

Yondalla tells them there's something good in him, something noble. Something worthy of making him the sacrifice to replace Arfil.

Valira wonders again why she's not worthy, if he is, with so much of his soul wished away, but she's needed on the prime material plane now, so they'll deal with questions of sacrifice later.

She does try to talk to Ewhoza, to see something good and noble in him. She says she knows what it's like to feel burdened by a demon, and offers to talk if he wants it, or to listen if he'd prefer that. He barely meets her eyes, and she leaves him be.

*

Ewhoza neither helps nor hinders them as they try desperately to save Arfil, to get to the last dragon in time. Valira uses the full power of her staff for the first time when Ewhoza's old friends kill Vesta, and is grateful that the rush of warmth she feels using it feels better than the ultimate power of the demon's solutions to problems.

They travel to the dragon, do their research, learn about items that will help them even more on their travels and go searching for those as well, and Valira feels the turn of the seasons and itches to move faster, to be better, to get rid of Seath before something irrevocable happens.

She treats with treants and Kithri with goblins and Phi with orcs, and when Phi goes bloodless (Valira remembers that very first rift, remembers what Phi looks like when the past is bearing down on her) and says she has to leave their quest for a while, Valira doesn't begrudge her, and goes to help. Anyone Phi hates the way she seems to hate this Crestmaker must deserve whatever he gets, and Valira fights his army single-mindedly, only telling Kithri to keep Ewhoza alive and conscious so his demon doesn't override his collar.

She almost dies, both from wounds taken on the battlefield and from Quil's attempt to save her, and when she wakes Quil is wan and terrified and Valira remembers her saying, once, that she feared her magic, that she brought fire on her own family and knew then that she couldn't be trusted around others.

Valira's words desert her, but she drags Quil to the warmth of their campfire that night and refuses to let her sit alone and hopes that it helps.

*

One of them has to tell Ewhoza that he's a sacrifice worthy of saving the god of paladins, and Valira does it, while she waits for the treants to make their decision.

He often seems like a man sleepwalking, but her question wakes him up. “I want to live,” he tells her. “My life is a poor one, and I may have power in a different way than I wanted it, but I'm still alive. I'm not a good enough man to sacrifice myself.”

It makes her ache for Arfil and for Paladine, but she can't blame him for wanting to live. Redemption shouldn't require death. She hopes it doesn't require death.

“Killing your friend would free the god,” he says abruptly when she's ready to stand and leave him alone, as he seems to prefer to be. “I'll do that, if you like.”

To her surprise, she thinks he means it as a kindness, and she responds to him more frankly than she otherwise would have. “I've thought about it. I don't want to, but I will if I have to.” She thinks of what she's asked of Phi. “Or Phi will. If we can't save him, we won't leave him to suffer. But if there's any way to save him, we'd like to take it.”

“Has one of you thought about replacing him?”

“Yes,” says Valira, and doesn't say any more.

Ewhoza gives her a long, searching look, and she's acknowledged all along that he's been twisted by his demon and by Seath, but for the first time she wonders what kind of man he'd be without them. It's all well and good to say he's a noble soul, but Phi and Quil and Kithri are all noble souls, and they couldn't be more different. She'd like to know who he is, without all of this, but there's Arfil and Paladine and Seath all to worry about, so she doesn't expect to get to know any time soon.

*

Or ever.

They make their plans, they deliver their news to Shulva, fighting their way up the mountain once again, but it goes wrong on their descent.

Her demon speaks up, warns her of coming danger (and sometimes, just sometimes, there's the dangerous thought that her demon might be growing fond of her, that he's happy keeping her company while he waits for her to be weak enough to use him, but she tells herself over and over that he can't take her whole soul if she dies with their contract only partly fulfilled), and then there's a balor, summoning other demons from nowhere and giving them a terrifying fight.

Valira stays upright, and gives Kithri her usual terse reminders to keep Ewhoza awake so his demon won't take over, but there are too many, and it's not enough.

Ewhoza crumbles into a pile of dust in front of them, and Kithri sweeps him up.

She could resurrect him, but she would only resurrect a demon, and there's no time, there's nothing she can do, and Valira mourns the man he could have been, the man he could have redeemed himself to be, and selfishly, the sacrifice that could have saved Arfil and Paladine.

They come back to Solomon's house ready to give him the solemn news, and find that a monster has destroyed the city.

Valira weeps from the dust in her eyes, from the death and destruction everywhere, from Seath's lack of care for anyone at all, and when they see him in the city streets and run, she only wishes she had the courage to stand and tell the demon to take everything she is, make her another pile of dust, if only it will _end him_.

Instead, they travel to Idilus and Erelest and then to Astora and make a plan to go to the other side of the world, and it feels like running, but Valira doesn't know what else to do.

*

Three months of travel is a long time. The grief for Ewhoza fades to a mere sting after only a few weeks, and Valira sets herself to paying attention to her companions and to the sights of the ocean. She demands stories from Kithri about her long life whenever her face grows dark with memories. She asks Phi about her home and lets the thought of having such a place lull her. She helps Quil practice her magic, and asks her about her bees when talking about her family seems like too much. Her demon is quiet for days at a time, and if it weren't for scrying and getting periodic news about the monster destroying city after city after town, the trip would almost feel like relaxation.

Irythyll, the Boreal Valley, they aren't relaxing. Storm giants are in danger, and once they're saved from a cult, there's still a cold city, still a pontiff who never mentions his god and a girl who thinks she killed a dragon that Valira has met and a silent companion who raises the hair on the back of her neck.

They're pulled through a rift to fight another group of adventurers in a different plane, and Valira does as she's ordered in the vain hope of Arfil's return and thinks once again of Haoti Ewhoza, and just how much choice he had in everything he did. They return to no victory and no more hope of it than they had before, and with just as much time on the other side of the world to fill.

They have a month, and Valira keeps her skills sharp by taking jobs to fight what they can. The devas sense the demon in her, judge her for it and come for her, but they fight them, fight everything, make allies and lose them.

The pontiff, in the end, is a friend of Seath's (his poisonous roots reach even here, it seems; he's a tree grown through half the world), and they kill him before they go. Phi takes his swords, and Valira might be worried about anyone having that kind of power, but Phi of all people can be trusted with it, so she turns her attention once again to their cannon.

As soon as they have it, she feels like time is moving again, and it's easy to turn Kithri into an elephant and travel all the way back across the world in an instant.

*

Suddenly, there's only a month until they'll have the power to kill Seath, and the need to save Arfil becomes the first priority. They make their plan, and there's no reason not to do it.

Before they travel to the Demon Web Pits, Valira spends most of a night begging Yondalla to watch over them, to hold them in her light. She doesn't feel anything, and wonders if Kithri is doing the same, but if it will help them at all, give them any more hope, she can't stay silent. The demon mocks her for it, but she ignores it as best she can and keeps praying.

The web is chilling, and Lloth is worse. She offers them a bargain, but so did Seath, and Valira doesn't trust these bargains. She trusted the possibility of sacrifice, but the gods have been silent when she begged them for an answer that isn't Ewhoza, asked if she would be worthy as well.

But when they think they'll have to make a bargain or leave alone once again, Kithri cries out for Yondalla and it seems she's been listening, because she can't help them much, in another goddess's realm, but she can move Arfil closer to them, and that's all they need. Valira grabs Kithri and Phi and Quil takes Arfil and they should be going home, they should be free and Arfil should be safe, but instead she finds herself in horrible darkness, surrounded only by spiderwebs.

There's little she or her magic can do here, but her companions, as always, find ways for them to get where they need to go. Valira follows them, and worries about Arfil, who is partly healed thanks to Kithri but who has retreated to his own head like Ewhoza always did. They climb across miles of web, fight what comes to them, and Valira keeps her eye on Kithri, who has been on edge since Lloth first spoke.

It's Quil who saves them, when they meet Lloth's handmaiden just when they think they're almost safe. Quil spins a lie as effortless and strong as the spiderweb they're standing on, and somehow, impossibly, they make it to a platform where their magic won't betray them and they make it home.

They lost weeks in the Demon Web Pits, but Valira is most worried about Arfil, who has always been inconsistent but never this blank, this broken. He'll be better without Paladine, but they chose to be together. Valira wants them sundered apart, has no great opinion of a body shared even with permission after what happened to Ewhoza, what could happen to her, but it's Quil's magic that will do the job, so she keeps quiet and lets Phi, well-reasoned Phi who keeps them all centered, help her make the decision.

Arfil is still tired, stumbling with grief, but Valira can't blame him, and she thinks he'll heal now, maybe even in time for the battle they all know is coming.

*

The battle, when it comes, is preceded by another trip to another plane where those they were manipulated to hurt before are there to hurt them in return. They seem terrifyingly powerful, resisting every attack Valira can throw at them and healing so much that halfway through the battle it's as though they've only begun it.

Valira thinks again of Haoti Ewhoza and all the choices he made and didn't get to make and she grits her teeth and keeps fighting them, exhausting herself even though they disappeared just as the storm giants were given the order to attack Seath's castle. Phi fights with grace and fury, cutting them down one by one, but in the end it's Quil who saves them all, calling fire and stone from the sky and blasting through their defenses.

The other group of adventurers leaves, scattered and ragtag, and whatever brought Valira and her friends there brings them back home again just to see the shape of Seath, in his dragon form at last, in the sky. Valira is tired and the earth will only give her so much magic, but she stands nonetheless, ready to end the battle one way or another, and then Paladine is with her, whispering in her ear, renewing her connection to the earth and healing her from every spell she took in their battle with the others.

A look at her companions shows that they're feeling just as rejuvenated, and just like that, they have a chance.

*

When Seath falls, it's almost a shock. They've spent so long fearing him, fighting him, and Phi seems to deal with him as easily as she might swat a fly, the rest of them lending their support and helping to end his long reign.

Lloth is in his place in moments, casting him aside, and Valira clutches her staff tight and reaches in her reserves for the worst spells she can deal and knows that her friends, their allies, everyone is doing the same. She's wounded, but that hardly matters, and even the demon doesn't offer his aid.

Lloth falls, and all of them are reeling, too many hurt and not yet healed, but it's over, and Valira's staff falls from numb fingers. She wants to jump and scream and fall to her knees and weep and take another drink from Kithri's flask, and since she can't do all of that, she goes to her friends instead, so they can all stand in a loose circle and consider the magnitude of what they've done.

_We could have been_ , the demon begins, but his voice cuts off, and Valira feels herself floating, coughing, an orange mist leaving her head, as though Lloth's death cut the connection between them or as though the new power she can feel thrumming through her veins left no room for him.

_I already am_ , she thinks and hopes he can hear it, but he doesn't matter. When her friends ask her if she's okay, fretting over her, she assures them she's fine, that she's alone in her own mind. That she's free to make her own choices in everything that comes next, and her soul, however tattered it might still be, is her own. She's chosen every tear in it and finds, with everything behind her, that she doesn't regret any of them.


End file.
